


tin can on a string

by stiction



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Canon-Typical Unreality, F/M, Light Dom/sub, PNWS Holiday Hellatus 2016, Psychic Strand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-14 01:03:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9149908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: “Richard,” Alex says soberly. When he meets her eyes she’s softened a little, almost smiling when she puts her free hand to his cheek. “The moment you start growing a beard again, I’m done with the Miss Cleo stuff, and you can call Tannis Braun for advice.”“I’ll make sure to keep a razor handy,” he says, because anything else would be careless.--PNWS Hellatus gift for ZombieBabs!





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZombieBabs (CommodoreOblivious)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ZombieBabs+%28CommodoreOblivious%29).



> Includes mentions of self harm, disordered eating, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. 
> 
> Poison oak, some boyhood bravery  
> When a telephone was a tin can on a string  
> And I fell asleep with you still talking to me  
> You said you weren't afraid to die  
> \- Poison Oak , Bright Eyes

“I need your help,” he says, and in the silence that follows he tries to remember how many times he’s told her this. He’s more anxious about it now: at some point, she’s bound to say no.

On the other end of the line, he hears Alex excuse herself, and then a door shutting. He can see her leaning against her office door with the phone to her chest, eyes shut as she steels herself.

“With what?” she says finally.

All the things he’d been prepared to say--roundabout ways to state his purpose, clinical adjectives versus softer alternatives--go out the window.

“Something stupid,” he says instead, and is rewarded by a tired laugh on her end.

“Alright,” she sighs. “I’ll bite.”

* * *

 

Alex rings the doorbell of his father’s house at 9:34 a.m. two days later.

Richard’s been up for nearly three hours already, wiping dust from the shelves and putting his books back on the shelves. The blankets on the couch are folded and put in the closet to build up the illusion that he doesn’t sleep in the living room more often than not. Ruby helped him repaint the master bedroom three weeks ago, and the bed frame, the mattress, the sheets and duvet are new, but living in that room feels like a trespass.

And his clothes, picked up from around the house and tossed in the hamper or refolded and put away, looked impossible to wear when he woke up. Wear something comfortable, Alex had texted him the night before, and he had bristled a little remembering it that morning. But the collar on his shirt felt too tight regardless, a blazer too formal. He settles on a pair of grey slacks and a soft black shirt. Early October in Seattle makes his home cold and damp, and he reaches for a sweater before another shirt catches his eye.

He puts it on over his shirt, rolls the cuffs up, and avoids the mirror by the closet on his way to the kitchen.

The kettle gets filled and set on the stove, two cups set out with teabags, sugar and some honey Alex brought over when he first moved in. There’s some food in the fridge, enough to get by for a few days if need be, and Ruby forced him to stock up on canned goods and nearly ready-made meals before she went back to Chicago to wrap things up.

When the doorbell finally rings, he turns the burner on under the kettle and goes to let her in.

Alex has the hood of her raincoat up but the front unzipped, and he can track the way she surveys him. Her eyes catch on his overshirt--the same flannel he was wearing the last time he asked her for something so monumental. Richard watches her catalogue it, maybe in the part of her mind that is constantly writing scripts. He didn’t ask her outright to keep this off the show.

“Hi,” she says, round-shouldered in her raincoat and boots, and he knows this will be off the record.

“Come in.”

Alex steps sideways past him. Her coat drips on the foyer floor when she shrugs it off. He hangs it for her. She reaches for his arm and balances on him while she toes out of her boots. The tips of her fingers press into his forearm just below the cuff of his flannel and the tides of anxiety settle, briefly.

She looks up towards him and smiles just a little, like she knows.

“Do you want some tea?” he asks, and Alex’s smile broadens.

“Of course. I didn’t end up getting coffee this morning. Didn’t want to be… frazzled. You know.”

He knows, and he follows her to the kitchen where the water is just barely beginning to boil. She sits in the chair closest to the stove and nudges his shin with her foot while he forces himself to go over the vague plan he made.

“Hardly very scientific,” Alex jibes, and he cringes a little.

“I’m well aware.”

She sobers visibly. “I get it. It’s for you, not for the academic vultures circling the Institute.”

Richard does his best not to scoff. The kettle starts to whistle. Alex’s smile lingers like a shield.

She drinks her tea before it’s cool enough--he knows this about her and she lends evidence to the theory at every opportunity. Alex takes a sip and flinches at the heat.

“You could just wait,” he says on impulse, and she screws her nose up like a much younger woman. Thirteen, not thirty-five. She must’ve raised hell in high school.

“I’d rather not,” Alex says simply. She puts mug to mouth again and drinks. “We’ve got work to do.”

* * *

 

Alex tilts a card up, peeks underneath, and puts it back down. The card, like all the other ones, looks thick and sturdy, and allows no light to pass through. Her right hand slips into her bag where it’s set on the table next to the stack of cards, and as Richard closes his eyes he can hear the rhythmic sound of her writing.

After that, it’s just the ticking timer.

He tries not to count it. With his eyes closed it could be any clock, anywhere. There was a clock in the kitchen when he moved in several months ago. It was old, and dead, and silent. There was a clock in his parent’s bedroom and his mother had asked him to take it down, near the end, and she hadn’t had to explain why. And in the house he had bought with Coralee, the dark wood two-story where Charlie trampled the flowers lining the walk every spring, the egg timer beside the stove counted down the cook time every night for dinner.

Over the ticking he hears Alex tap her pen once, twice, then realize her nervous tic and set the pen down. Her breathing is measured. He focuses on that, the routine draw and release, like it might pull her mind closer to his.

What had she seen?

He pictures the card. Square, with rounded edges. Black on one side, and on the other… something. Richard had asked her not to tell him. Anyone could guess right when they knew their options. From her perspective, he knows, the card is angled down, the picture shadowed by the morning light coming in the windows. Her fingertips are bitten and she presses them against the card to stop any shaking. A few strands of hair fall in front of her eyes and she pushes them back and focuses on an image that is still blurry but becoming clearer and--

The timer chimes. Both of them jump. His eyes open and the image is lost.

Alex reaches out to tap the button on top, and in sync he picks up his pen and draws a harsh x on his own notebook in the first line.

“Ready?” Alex asks. She’s barely glancing at him from the corner of her eye. He nods, and she draws another card, lifts it, and then sets it back on the table before tapping the timer again.

This time it’s easier to settle into the imagined perspective from the other side of the table. Alex shifts in her chair and her discomfort echoes off the walls of his study. She holds the card at an angle and peers underneath, and he pushes, just a little, his own hands folded tight around one another, until he can nearly feel the smooth finish on the card. For a moment he thinks--he imagines--he can see himself across the table, rounded shoulders and closed eyes.

The timer chimes. He marks an x.

She doesn’t ask if he’s ready this time, just waits until he folds his hands and shuts his eyes.

* * *

 

“I need a break,” Alex says, and the fuzzy image he’s trying to make out disappears.

A dull ache has worked up through the back of his neck to his forehead and it throbs when he lifts his head to look at her. He holds back on the impulse to berate her, to tell her how close he had been. She’s laced her fingers together like it’s the only way to avoid fidgeting, and her eyes look as tired as his feel.

“Alright.” Richard nods. “What time is it?”

Alex glances down at her watch, squinting in the light of the study, dim now that the sun has risen past the windows. “Nearly one. We should eat.”

His head throbs again. “I’m not hungry.”

She studies him for a moment before she moves around the table and comes to rest on the corner closest to him. Her hands are still warm despite the drafts and the terrible heating. Alex rests one hand on the base of his neck, her thumb pressing light just under his collar.

“You should eat,” she repeats.

Her tone is calm and he finds himself rising before he can make the decision to. She leads him to the kitchen and gives him small orders. His elbow brushes against her arm when she leans close to inspect what he’s doing and hums approval. He hasn’t had the drive to make an actual meal for himself in what seems like an eon, and the mundane magic of a recipe coming together is as surprising as it always used to be.

They sit in the front room, where Alex chews thoughtfully and watches the rain pour down through the bay windows.

“I heard it was supposed to storm pretty badly,” she muses. “Maybe some flooding.”

“It’s Seattle. Isn’t there always a possibility of flooding?”

Alex shoves at his leg with her toes, but he can see her smiling down at her plate. His own is half-empty already, somehow. He doesn’t remember what she called the meal. The way she moved around and measured from memory makes him think it’s a family recipe, something so ingrained it would be nearly hereditary. It’s good. Warm.

She finishes eating just after he does, setting her plate on the floor beside the couch and stretching.

“I’m pretty tired,” Alex says.

Now, he thinks, is when she’ll excuse herself for the day. She’ll go, and it will be his responsibility to reach out again. To ask her to come back, to help him with what he cannot do alone.

“How about a nap?” she asks. “A little birdy told me you finished renovating the bedroom a few weeks ago.”

“A bird?” he repeats.

“A _very disdainful_ little bird,” Alex adds. “Someday you’ll have to tell me how to get on her good side.”

The surreality of it is daunting. He takes their plates and puts them in the sink. Alex rests a hand on his back before they climb the stairs. The bedroom is at the end of the hallway, the door shut. He half-expects it to be locked when he reaches for the knob, but the door swings open easily.

Alex steps past him, turns slowly to take in the soft grey walls, the navy bedspread and simple headboard, and finally fixing on him. He is immediately convinced that she knows he doesn’t sleep in here.

“You look exhausted,” she says instead. “Come on.”

She takes her sweater off but leaves her shirt and leggings on. It takes him a moment, his hands hesitant, before he shrugs the flannel off. Alex sprawls across the bed with a sigh.

“This is a good bed,” she says. She shifts to one side of the bed when he sits down on the edge.  

“Glad to hear it.”

It does feel nice to lay down. Alex reaches to pull the thin blanket at the foot of the bed up over them. She leaves her hand where it falls, on his arm, tracing down to his elbow and back up.

“Come here,” she says, and it feels like the spell is finally broken when he can shift forward and rest his head on her shoulder. “You worked really hard today.”

It doesn’t matter how hard he worked, he thinks, if he didn’t get results. But Alex’s hand shifts to the back of his head, cards through his hair. She would be upset if he argued.

She keeps talking, almost too soft to make out over the sound of the rain, and by the time he thinks of a good enough protest, the draw of sleep has won.

* * *

 

He wakes up later to the sound of crashing thunder. The room is darker now, and under the blanket he’s still warm.

“Hey,” Alex murmurs.

In the flash of lightning he can see her push the hair out of her eyes again. She shifts up on her elbow and leans in close. Her mouth is warm, warmer than her hands where they move up under his shirt.

“Sleep well?” she asks in the space between two kisses, casual like she isn’t running one hand through his hair and pulling gently.

“I slept,” Richard says, and she whispers: “Good.”

Alex takes his wrist again--hesitates until he nods--and moves his hand under her shirt.

“The storm came,” he adds.

“It did.” Alex mouths at his neck, and bites.

“The road to the highway is probably flooded.”

She undoes the button to his pants one-handed and laughs against his shoulder.

“Guess I’ll just have to stay the night.”

* * *

 

Alex stays the night.

* * *

 

It rains until the sun comes up, and then it rains some more.

Alex cracks an egg into the pan. The sound of it is familiar and calls to Charlie and Coralee at the table for breakfast. Both of them preferred scrambled eggs.

There’s no clicking sound from the stove, no rhythmic whisking motion.

Alex turns towards the table, leaning back against the counter. She’s wearing the flannel shirt, buttoned crooked, and her leggings. No socks. He wonders absently at her constant heat. Maybe the chill doesn’t get under her skin the way it does his.

“Do you remember,” she starts, and he looks up from her feet. She’s staring out the side window of the kitchen at the rain pelting the bushes. “Last June, at that interview with Ms. Rodriguez. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt.”

He does remember. It was hot in Los Gatos, and the fan in Maria Torres’ kitchen was blowing Alex’s hair across her back every time it turned towards her.

“You were staring at my shoulders. My arms.”

He had been--the shirt was cut in across her back and at first he had thought: unprofessional, and then he had been briefly jealous, already sweating through his own shirt, and then he had noticed the small marks dotted across her shoulders and down her arms.

“It’s alright,” Alex clarifies now, in his kitchen and his clothes. “I mean, it happens a lot when I wear things like that. I’m used to it. You didn’t seem to care about them too much.”

He hadn’t. It had, essentially, been the start of their conjoined fall from professional grace. He’s seen the marks again, of course, pushing Alex’s shirt off her shoulder. Her smile is terse.

“When I was a kid, I got hurt a lot. Nothing major. Bug bites, skinned knees, just little things that were supposed to scab and then heal.”

Alex turns back to the pan with a spatula in hand and the soft scraping sound fills the silence.

“But I was an impatient kid. Impatient adult. You know how I am. So every time they would scab, I would pick at them. And they would bleed again, scab again, and I would pick it again. For weeks. I got chicken pox when I was nine, and my mom had to practically duct tape oven mitts on my hands to stop me from scratching every single bump open.”

She laughs once, and says: “I’m sure you’re familiar with self-destructive habits, Dr. Strand.”

He is. Intimately. The thought comes unbidden: his cupboards and his stomach empty for days after Coralee disappeared. He wouldn’t notice hunger until it made him dizzy and inept, and then it could be put aside with a bite or two of... something. He can’t recall eating anything that tasted good for at least a year.

“If you pick at a scab long enough,” Alex says, sliding the egg smoothly from pan to plate and turning to set it in front of him. “It’s gonna become a scar.”

She sits down across from him after that, her own egg on her own slice of toast. A sriracha bottle appears out of nowhere and she douses her food before digging in.

“I’m not saying anything you don’t already know,” she adds later, when they’re washing the breakfast dishes. His headache from yesterday has dissipated, but the thread of panic still runs below everything else.

He considers her standing beside him: almost a foot shorter, her hair hanging loose and limp around her face. The past months have not been kind to either of them, and he tries to remember this when the urge to cut her out of his life rises. She would be better off wrapped up in her work, with some thirty-something computer tech who wouldn’t ruin her life with sleepless nights. And he would survive.

“Is there a point you’re going to get to?” Richard asks.

Alex lets the dish she’s holding sink into the rinse water. He moves to pick it up, to dry it and set it in its place, but she takes his wrist in hand and holds it between the two of them.

“The point I’m getting to is that I hope you’re doing this for the right reasons. I have enough going wrong in my life as it is, and if we’re going to see this awful demon bullshit through, we can’t be falling apart at the same time.”

Her grip shifts on his wrist until her thumb presses against his pulse.

“Richard,” Alex says soberly. When he meets her eyes she’s softened a little, almost smiling when she puts her free hand to his cheek. “The moment you start growing a beard again, I’m done with the Miss Cleo stuff, and you can call Tannis Braun for advice.”

“I’ll make sure to keep a razor handy,” he says, because anything else would be careless.

* * *

 

Alex stays more than one night.

It’s not a point of discussion--he doesn’t ask for it and she doesn’t ask permission, but she stays two nights the first time and comes back three days later with an overnight bag and a toothbrush that she leaves next to his on the sink.

Most days they sit down with the cards at least once.

He gets better at it. At guessing, maybe. If he wants to play fast and loose with accepted scientific facts, then he would say that seeing through Alex’s eyes becomes easier the more time he spends with her.

Alex alters the experiments. One day she moves to the other side of the room, and from there to the kitchen, and then to his bedroom and beyond. She hits the attic on the Wednesday after they clean it out together, armed with a broom and dustpan.

Richard stays in the study, moves to his desk so he has the dark amber wood to focus on, and one notebook and a glass of whiskey to keep him company. Alex came back that morning with another change of clothes and the bags under her eyes dark with stress. She dug her fingers into his collar and kissed him before he could voice any vague concern, then went up the stairs to leave her bag at the foot of their bed.

From his seat in the study he was able to hear her footsteps in the attic, pacing to the end and then back once before she settled into the chair they dragged up there several days prior.

He shuts his eyes, settles in.

They agreed to forgo the formal timer after Alex decided it was too frustrating to try and sync the time from two separate places, but he has one on his desk--set to three minutes--and Alex has her phone timer set to four.

According to plan, he starts his timer just after she knocks on the attic floor.

The attic is still barely familiar but easy enough to visualize. Dusty and dim, weak sunlight coming through the windows on the ceiling. Alex is wearing a loose sweatshirt and jeans, and he can see her sitting cross-legged on the floor without issue.

She turns the card over all the way. There’s no chance of him glimpsing it on accident.

He falls into it easily enough: her heartbeat is regular, her hair pulled back off her face with a folded scarf. Plain short nails tapping against the smooth cardstock. The card shows… Something. It’s a new symbol, but his hand moves automatically to sketch it in the notebook before his timer rings.

In the space between, Richard lingers in the attic. The air up there is more damp. Alex is probably picking at the dirt under her nails. She stayed with Nic for a few nights, to keep him company and to go hiking in the rain. He knows because she had told him before leaving him in bed a few mornings ago.

Her timer rings, and he waits for her knock to restart his own.

He can see the card the moment he moves back into her space in the attic: a small star between two squares. He marks it in pen, as neatly as possible. His feet tingle suddenly, like they’ve fallen asleep, and he holds off from telling her to uncross her legs.

There’s still plenty of time left on the timer, and Richard takes the opportunity to examine the attic again. They had moved most of the boxes to other rooms and swept the cobwebs out of the eaves.

Alex is biting at her hangnails again, lost in thought. A pinprick of pain twinges in his own finger and he imagines she drops her hand in surprise to see a bright well of blood.

His timer rings.

She wipes her hand hurriedly on her pants and pinches her fingertip with her other hand until the bleeding stops.

Her timer rings. A moment later she knocks.

He catches just a glimpse of the card this time before the attic light goes fuzzy. He loses sight of Alex’s sore fingers and the worn cuffs of her sweatshirt. Darkness wells up from the corners of the attic and Alex’s rattling train of thought leads him away from the present.

He’s… warm. Tucked into bed but with the covers kicked off his legs. The only light in the room bleeds through the blinds from a streetlight outside. He knows the sound of pipes and traffic, the smell of a lavender air freshener. It’s Alex’s bedroom, a few stories above the streets of Seattle.

Here it is raining as well, but that’s not what dragged them awake.

Something strange is happening. He feels a wave of deja vu for something he personally has never felt. A light wet pressure traces his foot and his leg jerks in the present. Richard identifies the thing weighing his chest down as, succinctly, _dread_.

A soft noise echoes off the walls of Alex’s bedroom--she whimpers in this moment, a tired and fearful sound as her hand flails out towards the light. His hand tenses when hers grips the pull chain and tugs hard enough to rock the lamp.

In the dark at the foot of bed, something terrible opens its eyes.

Dread gives way to full-bodied terror. One of their hands strikes out and pain flares up an arm, not quite strong enough to shake the dream.

Alex’s legs twist sluggishly in the sheets and the cat’s head follows, puppeted in jerky motions. There’s a groan from the attic above or the bedroom in the past and Richard pushes against the edge of the vision until his hand is his own again, fumbling until the sound of breaking glass breaks the spell.

He’s out of his chair and on the floor when he comes to, struggling to his feet. Another flare of pain arcs through his hand and through the blur he can see blood streaking his palm. The attic stairs are loud with pounding footsteps and he makes it to the kitchen before Alex bursts through the door.

Her face is red, hair disheveled. She’s grabbing for paper towels and picking the glass out of his cut in one disjointed motion, her mouth moving but the sound muted. Alex’s hands are too fast to track. His hand is wrapped in white and held fast between her palms. The room steadies and then snaps back into place when she grabs the back of his neck with one hand.

“Richard,” Alex says, her hands oddly cool on his hands and his neck and his face. He goes where she pulls him and presses his face into her sweatshirt. She runs her fingers through his hair, until his pulse has slowed and he can move without feeling bile in the back of his throat.

She untangles him, carefully, from her waist. He can feel her speak through the moving of air in her chest but can’t make out the words. She’s gone and then back again, handing him a glass of water and then some ibuprofen.

Richard finally looks up. He wants to mock the offering, berate her for pushing him to the brink and then giving him something so paltry in return like it’ll ease the fire in his skull, but the helpless look on her face stops him cold. He takes a drink instead, and in the borrowed time reminds himself that he was the one who asked for help. Alex hasn’t asked him for anything but the most basic tenets of self-preservation.

“Thanks,” Richard says, gesturing with the hand with the pills in it before he brings them to his mouth and swallows.

“Richard,” Alex says. Her arms are crossed tight over her chest, but she softens when at last he convinces himself to reach out towards her. She concedes by loosening one hand and wrapping it around his wrist. The pressure sends a shiver through him and Alex moves forward, hesitating only a moment before she slides onto his lap, weighing him down against the hard back of the chair.

Like a security blanket, the pressure calms what was left of his sudden fever. He lets his hands hang to the sides of the chair and his forehead press to Alex’s shoulder. The sweatshirt is Nic’s, he knows this by the faint smell of cologne and is surprised by the lack of jealousy.

It helps to have her here. Helping him.

He wraps his hands around the wooden slats of the chair back without thinking--after that he starts thinking about Alex holding him here like this two Thursdays ago with a soft scarf tied over his eyes. At first he’d thought she’d found it in the basement, another small reminder that this house used to belong to someone else. But it hadn’t smelled musty, wasn’t yellowed with age, so Alex must have brought it with her. Must have dug it out of her closet some time before, knowing what she would use it for.

Alex shifts in his lap in the Wednesday that is today, like she’s remembering the same space of time. Like her hands, too, are itching to be where they were.

“Do you need me to…?” She ventures, trailing off. He presses his face into her neck until she pushes him back. He can’t quite meet her eyes. “That’s not an answer,” she scolds. Her voice is gentle but he can hear the faint chill behind the words.

“Maybe just--the blindfold again,” Richard manages. His heartbeat is still elevated, only partially from the exertion.

Alex strokes her thumbs across his cheeks and down his jaw.

“Please,” he adds after a moment.

“Of course,” Alex murmurs. “You only needed to ask.”

She pushes down on his shoulders as she stands, the sudden pressure grounding until it disappears. Alex moves quietly out of the room and returns with the scarf, neatly folded.

He watches his knees as Alex moves past. She stops to brush her fingers through his hair before she draws the scarf over his eyes and ties it at the back of his head. It used to take her longer, and she would reposition and re-tie and worry at the edges of it, but in the fading afternoon light she moves with greater confidence. She pauses a moment behind him, and then she kneels, her hands on his wrists to move them into place. He lets her readjust him and holds fast to the chair back when she lets go. The cut on his hand rubs up against the wood.

“There,” Alex says. “Hold still for now.”

She stands, moves around the kitchen behind him. Her feet are quiet and shoeless and he has no idea what she’s doing until he hears the click of the stove.

“How’re you feeling?”

The floorboards creak. How is he feeling? Like the hours after a fever breaks, when the potential for burning still hovers close. His thoughts drift and nearly snag on the edge of the cards in the attic and the darkness beyond; he has to forcibly steer them away.

“Present,” he says, as soon as it’s not a lie. “It’s… quiet.”

“Good.” Alex’s hand settles at the nape of his neck and squeezes once.

“I saw--” Richard starts. “There was a cat.”

Her hand freezes.

“Alex, I--”

“What?”

Uncertainty sets in when the rush of adrenaline fades. The thought that he, however briefly, managed to read her mind, is absurd. He has read hundreds of case studies of extra sensory phenomenon and nothing in those journals was comparable to whatever happened in his study.

“Richard,” Alex says, nearly inaudible. “What did you see?”

“Nothing that made sense. I must’ve imagined--” He stops as her grip adjusts, the ragged edges of her fingernails threatening the back of his neck. “I don’t… I don’t know what it was. But for a moment, it seemed as though I was, maybe, experiencing… Something unusual. Something that you may have experienced.”

“You saw her,” Alex murmurs.

“I saw _something_.”

“There is a time and place for the skeptic bullshit, Richard. Right now, I need you to tell me what you saw.”

Her voice breaks on the last word and his hand throbs where he grips the chair tighter.

“I saw your bedroom,” he starts, slow enough that he can lay the thoughts in line. “You had… woken up. Been woken up, more accurately. There was something at the foot of the bed. You reached to turn the light on, and saw…”

The rest sticks in his throat. Alex shifts her weight behind him.

“I saw her,” she says, when he can’t. In another moment she’s around the chair and in his lap again, holding his head down to her shoulder and burying her face in his neck. “Oh, god. You saw her, too.”

Saw something, he wants to say. Impossible, he wants to argue. It wasn’t real, it was something stress-induced and impossible to replicate, impossible to _prove_.

Alex isn’t crying but her breath is rough and her hands are shaking when she reaches for his hands and sets them on her back. He puts the arguing aside for another day.

The dread dissipates slowly with Alex’s tremors. Her breathing steadies and the room grows quiet and he focuses on that, on the soft smell of her perfume and the sureness of her, warm and present in his lap. She holds him with her arms around his shoulders and presses close.

She stirs when the kettle whistles, moves slowly to disentangle herself.

The sounds of her in the kitchen are familiar now. Alex pours the water over the tea, doles out sugar or honey, taps the spoon on the rim of the mug after stirring it. He thinks he can hear her hum something. Just a fragment of a melody in the back of her throat, in tune with the way she clears the counter. Tea, honey, sugar to the cupboard, and the spoon to the sink.

“Here,” she murmurs, once the rhythm has brought him back to baseline. It’s quiet.

He moves to take the cup but she holds it out of reach until he lowers his hands again. She guides him with a hand at the back of his head, and he goes, trusting, to the sweet warmth of the tea.

 


End file.
